


in every life (you'll haunt me)

by cassiesandsmarked



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 05:54:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1929207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassiesandsmarked/pseuds/cassiesandsmarked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>four ways they could have met + one way that they do</p>
            </blockquote>





	in every life (you'll haunt me)

The first time he sees her face— _really_ sees it, that is, because he knows who she is, has seen flashes of blonde hair beside Councilwoman Abby Griffin on Unity Day, has seen her turning corners with the Chancellor’s son, has heard her laugh from across the room—is at her trial. He’s stationed at the door with another guardsman, hands clasped in front of him, looking straight ahead while the fate of an eighteen year old girl is decided by six privileged _assholes_ who think that they can play God.

Her charges are read. She only sits up straighter and sets her jaw. She’s trying too hard, Bellamy thinks, because he can see right through her front. She’s terrified, underneath the steely exterior.

He watches her crumple—not really, not in front of them, but he sees it in her eyes and in the way her hands start to shake—when they order her execution the next day.

He can’t help but think that it could be Octavia sitting there and he feels a pang of something like hopelessness, as if the death of Clarke Griffin will be the final straw, the final act which will destroy his faith in humanity’s goodness—which is stupid, he knows, because he’s never even spoken to the girl. But there’s something in the way she stands now, straight and resolute, and the way she jerks her arm away when a guardsman grabs it and the way her eyes find his for just a second, yet he feels like, if they weren’t here and now, this girl could learn him inside and out, that makes him want to grab her and run, as if there were anywhere to hide on the Ark.

It keeps him up that night.

The next morning, when he’s ordered to escort her to her execution, he wishes he could say that _no_ , he won’t be a part of it, that he wants nothing to do with it. But he can’t and that’s how he ends up punching in the code that opens her cell door, saying, “Prisoner 3-1-9, face the wall,” partly because it’s protocol and partly because it’s easier to think that he’s killing Prisoner 3-1-9, a nameless, faceless criminal, than Clarke Griffin, a girl with an entire life ahead of her that she won’t ever get to live.

Clarke stands, wipes her charcoal-covered hands on her pants. Bellamy looks down and, instead of flat, gray cement, he sees a mural in black and white, spanning the entire floor, bringing to life a forest and a cloudy, star-filled sky. The cell walls are covered in sketches, too. One is of a smiling man who Bellamy thinks he recognizes as Clarke’s father, another is of a horse, and, below that, he sees his own face staring straight ahead, lips pursed into a tight frown.

Clarke’s eyes study him for a moment before they flit over to her sketch and then back once more. She makes a soft noise that he thinks might be a hum of self-approval before she turns to face the wall.

He snaps the handcuffs onto her wrists and wonders why it feels like he’s just cocked the gun that’s going to kill her.

He touches her arm, just barely, because he doesn’t want to jerk her around like the guard at her trial, and nods his head towards the door.

They walk in silence, her with her head held high and him with his hands clasped, just a step behind her. Before the doors open, he leans in and tells her, lowly, “I’m sorry.”

She looks at him for a second and, this time, he can’t tell what she’s thinking. Finally, she says, “So am I,” before she steps out onto the platform. He follows and the doors click shut.

Her mom is there and, as soon as he has unlocked Clarke’s handcuffs, Abby pulls her into a tight embrace, her face buried in Clarke’s blonde hair. This is the only time Bellamy sees Clarke cry. It tugs at something in his gut and makes him wish that he could stop this.

Clarke lets go first. Her lips turn up in a watery smile and she says, “It’s okay, mom,” before she turns and walks into the airlock. The doors shut behind her and the sound of it makes Bellamy flinch.

He looks away before they unseal the outer doors, but, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Abby Griffin’s hand clap over her mouth to smother a sob.

He can’t sleep again that night because, every time he closes his eyes, he sees the sketches on the walls of Clarke’s cell, her mother’s eyes filling with tears, a flash of blonde hair rounding a corner.

He spends days wondering if he’s ever going to be able to live with himself for walking her to her death.

The Ark runs out of oxygen two weeks later. Before he blacks out, Bellamy wonders if this is what people mean when they talk about karmic balance in the universe. He thinks that it probably is.

-

Clarke is laughing at something Wells said when she sees him across the room. He’s talking with another guardsman, but his eyes are on her and she thinks it should make her uncomfortable, but, instead, she feels something like a gravitational pull. Before she really thinks about what she’s doing, she’s telling Wells that she’ll be right back and she’s pushing through the throngs of people to cross the room.

She brushes past him, blue eyes meeting brown, and nods her head towards the door, hoping he’ll understand it as an invitation for him to follow her.

He does, apparently, because, maybe thirty seconds after she’s left the party, he does as well, his lips tugging into a smirk as he saunters over to her.

“How’s it goin’, princess?” he asks and, for whatever reason, the nickname makes her feel flustered, unbalanced.

“Why were you watching me?” she asks. It comes off sounding more accusatory than she means for it to because, really, she’s just curious.

The corners of his mouth only pull up farther and he leans his shoulder up against the wall, casual and relaxed. “Why were _you_ watching me?” he counters, quirking an eyebrow.

“I—I asked you first!” she splutters, wincing at how childish she sounds.

He laughs, but it’s warm and amused, like he finds her. She feels herself relax at the sound.

“You have a nice laugh,” he says. “That’s why I was watching you.”

Clarke feels her face heat up and she hopes he can’t see her flushed cheeks. If he can, he doesn’t say anything.

She doesn’t know how to respond to that—she’s never been great at receiving compliments, never knows how she’s supposed to react—but he doesn’t seem to mind, just looks at her for a few beats longer before pushing off of the wall.

“See you around, princess,” he says, making his way back to the party.

The doors have already shut behind him when Clarke realizes she never asked him his name.

-

Bellamy finds out that his sister is on the ground a week after the drop ship launches. Four days later, he hears Doctor Abby Griffin bartering with Nygel for a pressure regulator and he remembers that her daughter is one of the hundred sent to the ground. He thinks that if anyone wants to get to Earth as badly as he does, it might be her. So, he follows her to mecha and he sees the pod and, when Abby leaves the Reyes girl, to buy her time, he says, “I’m going with you.”

Raven whips around to face him, wielding a wrench threateningly. She only relaxes slightly when she sees that he isn’t a guard.

“My sister’s on the ground. I’m going with you,” he says again, this time more vehemently.

For a few moments, she just looks at him before she throws a hand up and waves him over, looking annoyed, but not quite annoyed enough to brain him with a wrench, which might be as good as it’s gonna get. “Just stay out of my way,” is all she says before she gets back to work on the pressure regulator.

A few minutes pass in silence that drags on and on and right when Bellamy is about to ask if she can move any fucking faster, she’s grinning and throwing him a helmet and a suit.

He doesn’t know how long they’re actually in the pod—it could have been minutes or it could have been hours—but the landing knocks them both unconscious and it’s light outside when he comes to, which he’s pretty sure it wasn’t when they landed. He hears Raven groan next to him as he’s pulling off his own helmet and using the palm of his hand to wipe the blood off of his face.

Then, the door of the pod opens and someone gasps an, “Oh my god,” and, after his eyes adjust to the brightness, he sees a golden-haired girl beaming at him.

“We made it,” Bellamy says gruffly.

The girl just breathes out something that’s almost a laugh and nods, even though it wasn’t a question, and then she grabs his arm to help him out of the pod.

Leaves crunch under his foot with the first step he takes and, suddenly, he’s overwhelmed by the sounds, the trees, the crisp air. He can’t stop himself from grinning.

When he looks down, he sees the blonde girl smiling back at him.

-

The medical bay has been _ridiculously_ busy all day—it’s because there’s a flu going around and anyone who so much as sneezes comes running, terrified that they’re coming down with something—and Clarke is about ready to fall over and die when someone calls her over to check on a guardsman who was injured during training. And, while it’s a welcome break from the coughing and vomiting, Clarke is just _so damn tired_ that she doesn’t even say a greeting or ask for a name before she asks, in a clipped, irritated tone, “What is it?”

The guard snorts and then winces, hand going to his ribs. “Hello to you, too,” he says.

She sighs and runs a hand over her face. “Sorry. I’m Dr. Griffin.”

“Bellamy Blake,” he says.

“It’s your ribs, then?” she asks, switching back to serious doctor mode, and he nods. “Lift up your shirt.” He raises his eyebrows, looking amused, but does as she asks. There’s a purple bruise blooming on the left side of his ribs, marring his smooth tan skin. If she weren’t so tired, she might have taken a moment to admire the view. “Tell me if this hurts,” she says, lightly probing around the injury.

He flinches away. “Yeah, it hurts,” he says, but there isn’t any bite to his words.

She examines it for another minute, keeping her touch light, before pulling away. “You can put your shirt down,” she says. “It looks like you’ve fractured your left fifth, sixth, and seventh ribs. I can get you some painkillers for the next few days, but, really, you’re just gonna have to tough it out for the next three to four weeks. I’d recommend an icepack to reduce pain and swelling. Also, no strenuous physical activity until you’ve come back here and I’ve cleared you to work. Got it?”

He smirks. “Yeah, alright.”

She grabs the pain medication out of a cabinet and hands it over, walking him through the dosage. Once she’s finished, she waits for him to leave, but he doesn’t, so she says, “Now, get the hell out of here. You’re not my only patient, you know.”

He laughs, although it quickly turns into a groan, and gives her an exaggerated half-bow before he leaves.

Clarke rolls her eyes, but she’s also biting back a smile and she finds herself thinking about his laugh before she falls asleep that night.

She clears him to work three and a half weeks later. He throws a wink over his shoulder before he leaves the medical bay. She’s torn between rolling her eyes and wanting to kiss him.

She sees him once in the halls that week and it’s the first time she sees him out of his uniform. He looks good, she thinks, in his steely blue t-shirt and jeans. He doesn’t notice her—he’s talking to an older woman with stern eyes and chestnut hair that is streaked with gray, looking more serious than Clarke has ever seen him.

The next time she sees him, a whole month later, he’s being carried into the medical bay on a stretcher and there’s blood soaking through his shirt, seeping through onto the stretcher, pooling at his side. He’s still awake, although he’s pale, on the brink of unconsciousness because of the blood loss. His eyelids are fluttering and his mouth is twisting in pain and it makes Clarke feel sick to her stomach.

She’s a doctor, she tries to remind herself as she starts barking orders at her apprentices. She’s seen worse than this. She’s seen people come back from _so much worse_ than this.

It isn’t until his shirt has been cut off and she’s wiped off the excess blood that she sees that the bullet nicked his abdominal aorta. She thinks she feels her own heart stop. No one comes back from something like this.

It doesn’t stop her from trying, trying to close the artery, trying to keep him from bleeding out on her operating table.

He stops breathing once, only for a few seconds. And then he stops a second time and he doesn’t start again.

One of her apprentices has to talk her down, practically has to pull her away from his body. Clarke’s hands are shaking, covered in blood, _his_ blood, when she says, “Time of death: August 4th, 4:17 p.m.”

-

The drop ship’s landing is rough and it jerks Bellamy forward in his seat hard enough that the seatbelt leaves angry red marks on his skin. He doesn’t really care, though, just rips it off and lurches to his feet. He makes it to the outer doors before the crowd of delinquents does and he starts barking orders. “Hey, just back it up, guys!”

“Stop!” someone says and he turns. It’s Clarke Griffin, blonde, blue-eyed, and stern-looking, pushing through the crowd. “The air could be toxic,” she says, like she thinks he’s an idiot.

“If the air’s toxic, we’re all dead anyway,” he tells her. She snaps her mouth shut.

And then he hears Octavia’s voice and he forgets all about Clarke Griffin until her friend Wells—Wells _Jaha_ , as in the Chancellor’s son, the son of the man who gave the order to execute Bellamy’s mother—starts shooting his mouth off.

“Screw your father,” Octavia says. “What, you think you’re in charge here? You and your little princess?”

“Do you think we care who’s in charge?” Clarke asks. “We need to get to Mount Weather—not because the Chancellor said so, but because the longer we wait, the hungrier we’ll get and the harder this’ll be. How long do you think we’ll last without those supplies? We’re looking at a twenty mile trek, okay? So, if we want to get there before dark, we need to leave. Now.” She sounds haughty and that gets under Bellamy’s skin—and it really pisses him off that he knows she’s right.

“I’ve got a better idea. You two go,” he says. “Find it for us. Let the privileged do the hard work for a change.” Agreement ripples through the crowd.

Clarke scowls. Bellamy scowls back.

That’s how it starts.


End file.
